More fun with technology

[giza]

This article made Slashdot, and I figured I'd link to it here as well:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050106/RCIBCEMAIL06/TPBusiness/Canadian

The short version:

- Executives at a company decided they wanted to defect and start their own company.
- They discussed this over the company e-mail system
- Company actually monitors e-mails sent and sues executives


Lesson learned: employers monitor e-mail. Don't discuss stuff over it that you don't want them to find out about. Get a Gmail account and upgrade your cellphone plan instead. :-)


In other news, work is going a little better for me. I got caught up on a bunch of my bugs and managed to find and fix some new ones that no one else knew about.

Comments

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

That's why I never ever communicated anything about job searching via corporate e-mail. Now if they want to sniff my pop/imap/smtp (to my ISP) connections, I might have a problem, but, I doubt that they're doing that :)

[wesha.livejournal.com]

Right observation, wrong conclusions.

1) for sensitive emails, use encryption tools such as PGP or GPG.
2) do not trust phones either, always speak in person. (We calculated that it would cost a cellphone carrier only about $0.20 per month to store ALL of your conversations, so who knows, you might unkowingly be paying them to keep the evidence against yourself...)

[sleepingwolf.livejournal.com]

I would expect that if they were monitoring email that closely that they would notice encrypted mail very quickly, and since employer-owned computers would therefore be involved I would imagine a keystroke logger (or similar mechanism) would be placed on that machine to sniff the original plaintext.

Your point about phones is well-taken, though it should be noted that it is significantly more difficult to search for keywords in a raw voice recording compared to email.

[wesha.livejournal.com]

> though it should be noted that it is significantly more difficult to search for keywords in a raw voice recording compared to email.

I didn't claim they're monitoring voice traffic. I merely said that it is possible to keep all your phone conversations recorded for as low as a few cents of month, and pull them up to use as evidence in court if you screw up.

My calculations are as follows:

1 minute of stereo MP3 / 128 kb/s (music): 1Mb.
1 minute of mono MP3 recording of your voice / 32kb/s (we do not need crystal clarity, it's quite enough if the voice is recognizeable): 128Kb.
Minutes of that can be stored on a single 160 Gb hard drive: 160Gb / 128Kb = 1'310'720
Number of minutes a customer uses per month: 1000
Approximate number of customer-months of conversations one such hard drive can hold: ~1310
Price of hardware to store a month of compressed voice for one customer: $160 / 1310 = $0.12
Average price of a 1000-minute calling plan: $70.

Plausible? You betcha.

[giza.livejournal.com]

>I merely said that it is possible to keep all your phone conversations
>recorded for as low as a few cents of month, and pull them up to use as
>evidence in court if you screw up.

IANAL, but a search warrant would be needed before any phone conversations on an individual's private cellphone could be recorded. Anything recorded before a search warrant is issued would be inadmissible in our legal system.

[wesha.livejournal.com]

I've illustrated that it's technically and financially feasible. Whether to believe it's actually happening or not, is up to the person's level of paranoia. =^.^=

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

Well, duh that employers read e-mails. It amazes me how stupid employees are sometimes. If you want to do personal things on company time, get a Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc account and make sure the others you're corresponding with inside the company have the same. Even better, do all your e-mailing from home.

Similar thing happened in the town I live: This woman who worked for a local day spa decided to strike out on her own with a nail/tanning place. She had the prospectus for it in her belongings which she brought to work. Her employer went through her things, found the prospectus, found a reason to fire her, then opened up her own nail/tanning place.

Lesson learned: Do not trust employers and never, ever bring anything to work you don't want your boss to know about.